Check out the guidelines to prepare your track for Mixing & Mastering.
1.) Make your drums and vocals the loudest elements in your track.
We think vocals and drums should be the loudest elements in a song.
Explanation:
a) DRUMS:
It gives your track the groove and foundation, so those should be relatively loud compared to the other elements.
b) VOCALS :
In most genres’ vocals are the most important element.
Therefore, the vocals need to be the loudest to help cut through the other elements in the track and make the lyrics and melody more memorable.
Don’t believe me?
Pull out some of your famous tracks & notice that the vocal & drum are always the loudest element.
2)Audio levels
Don’t export your track too loud because the mastering process won’t be able to make it much louder & you’ll end up with a song that sounds flat and has no dynamics, which gets boring really fast to a listener.
Ideally aim to have the master channel hitting between -3 and -6 dB in your DAW. This means that the loudest parts of your song should never be louder than -3 dB on your master channel so try to lower the volume of the track’s parts (which are very loud) to make sure you’ve fixed it.
If you record the audio too loud, it will affect the final audio quality so always record your audio in presentable volume i.e. between -3 and -6 db.
3) FILE FORMAT
Record & export your audio only in WAV/FLAC file format (high quality) .
Using a high quality audio file for the mixing &mastering stage will help us to give you a better sounding mix.
4) Rough mix for reference
While sending your files for mixing &mastering, always include a reference mix so that our engineers can understand the sound & the style you’re going for.